ÉMILE-ANTOINE BAYARD AND ALPHONSE DE NEUVILLE, ILLUSTRATIONS FOR JULES VERNE’S FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, 1865

In 1865, two French illustrators and a science fiction writer holed themselves up in an apartment in Paris and set to work imagining a journey to the Moon. They wondered what a rocket should look like and drew something with multiple stages that could be discarded on the way out of the atmosphere, leaving only a small shiny steel capsule to travel to the Moon itself. They wondered where a rocket might be launched from and, after a few calculations of escape velocities, decided on Florida. They asked themselves what the rocket should be called and came up with Columbiad. They speculated on how the rocket might return to Earth and had the idea that it might ditch somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. During a TV broadcast aboard Apollo 11, 104 years later, Neil Armstrong named Jules Verne as one of the reasons why he and his crew had made it to the Moon.

The power of art helps us to imagine the lives we want to lead ahead of our capacity to actually lead them. Verne and his illustrators had not, in their era, known exactly what propulsion mechanisms would be needed; they hadn’t grasped much about the finer aspects of pressurised suits, lunar gravitation or radio telecommunications. But these were, in the greater scheme of things, details. What counted was that these artists had had the audacity to dream and to arrive at images that could guide subsequent, more incremental efforts.

It may not be the Moon we need to get to, but a picture of the future may be equally important in guiding us to our particular goals. We may need a picture of what it would be liked to be married or divorced; how we could set up our own business; what it might be like to live in another country, take early retirement or assemble a new and better group of friends. We’re so obsessed by failure and judgement that we quash most of our schemes long before they have even taken form. Our minds are too scared even to allow us to speculate on what we long for. ‘What would you try to achieve if you knew you could not fail?’ remains one of the most provocative questions we can put to our hesitant selves. Art can make us a map of a future we are as yet too timid to create concretely; it can set the path and wait for a few years – or a century – for us to catch up.

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